After 20 years of economic growth and a world-class welfare system, there is something fundamentally wrong when 600,000 Australian children currently live below the poverty line. Whilst poverty persistently resists amelioration, our body politic denies to the indigent the possibility to forge a better future for themselves and their children.

Euphemistically captioned policies are headlined as "welfare to work" or "fair incentives to work". Although enthusiastically supported by the major parties, the fact is they continue to plunge families into penury at an increasing rate. The glaring and disgraceful social wounds of child poverty threaten our capacity for empathy and compassion by their very intransigence.

The causes of child poverty are many and varied. There is stark evidence however, that poverty is generationally entrenched in households where no one is in the paid work force. Moving people to lower welfare support payments without removing the multiple barriers to work is counter-productive. It simply adds to Australia’s swelling ranks of the homeless and hungry.

The recent household, income and labour dynamic in Australia (HILDA) survey by the university of Melbourne sounded the alarm on child poverty, finding that the rate of lone parent child poverty has jumped 15% since 2001. Additional demand for services from the underfunded non-government charitable sector is at now at breaking point.

Amongst the barriers to employment are affordability and accessibility of childcare; secure housing; the cost and availability of transport; and access to further education and training. Over the past decade, successive changes to welfare have missed a chance to implement reforms that could lift poor Australian families out of poverty.

That bill was an extension of the welfare to work reforms introduced in 2005. It removed the grandfather clauses that allowed single parents to claim the parenting payment until their youngest child turned 16. Now when the youngest child turns eight, single sole parents will be abruptly moved onto the lower unemployment payment known as Newstart.

The Salvation Army, along with the Australian council of social service, the UN rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights and business groups all assert that this change has placed families at increased risk of poverty. A sole parent with no earnings and studying to acquire new skills who is caring for a primary school aged child will be $73 per week worse off. Under the new arrangements, Newstart now equates to a welfare benefit of just $38 per day. It is a pitiful amount. Instead of moving people from welfare to work, they are moved from welfare to worse.

So why the doublespeak? As American writer E B White said: "prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts". Prejudice lies at the heart of the simplistic mantra that welfare recipients are "dole bludgers" or "welfare cheats". It sits with cruel irony against the increase in middle class welfare that has been effortlessly sanctioned at the expense of children in poverty. This will have consequences beyond our imagining.

Why does the plight of 600,000 children in poverty not engender moral outrage? Why are we apparently indifferent to the plight of 2,000 children under lock and key in detention centres? Particularly as government policy states that no child will be placed in detention except as a last resort.

Throughout the past decade almost every Australian human rights commissioner and ombudsman has warned the government of the dangers that mandatory detention poses to children. A 2004 report by the human rights and equal opportunity commission into the detention of children bluntly said that the policy, “constituted cruel, inhumane and degrading punishment.”

A plethora of parliamentary committee reports has also issued dire warnings on the harm caused to children in detention. As recently as 2011, just six months before the government revived the Pacific Solution, a committee headed by Labor MP Daryl Melham received an avalanche of submissions indicating that the detention of children remained anathema throughout the wider community.

The treatment of so many children in distress, whether homegrown or in detention, is a painful indication of shameless indifference or at the very least ineptitude by government.